Philippe Petit ties the knots on the Woodstock Writers Festival

Friday

Apr 12, 2013 at 2:00 AM

The Woodstock Writers Festival — billed as bringing the hottest names in literature to the coolest town in the world — is not just for writers. The four-day event is a veritable feast for aficionados of both written and spoken word.

Pat De Mono

The Woodstock Writers Festival — billed as bringing the hottest names in literature to the coolest town in the world — is not just for writers. The four-day event is a veritable feast for aficionados of both written and spoken word.

The mantra of this fourth annual festival is, in fact, "reading, writing, and revelry," according to Executive Director Martha Frankel. From the opening night "Story Slam" — where participating readers have three minutes to tell a tale within the confines of prohibited and compulsory words — to the closing "Memoir-A-Go-Go" — featuring a trio of celebrated memoirists (Andre Dubus, Christa Parravani and James Lasdun) — the festival schedule is packed with readings, writing workshops, discussions and entertainment.

When Frankel, herself an accomplished author and celebrity interviewer, began planning the event in November, she put together a "wish list" of festival invitees. Sometimes because of serendipity, she said, the crème de la crème of the literary world agreed to come to Woodstock.

Cheryl Strayed, whose No. 1 New York Times best-seller "Wild" was an Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection and has been optioned for film, will appear in conversation with WAMC's Joe Donahue ("Going Wild!" 7:30 p.m. April 20) Although this event has been sold out, Frankel says, it, and the entire festival program, is available for viewing via live streaming.

Writer, lecturer, artist, magician, and world-renowned high-wire artist Philippe Petit will introduce his audience to the subject of his eighth book, "Why Knot?," a how-to guide to tying more than 60 "ingenious, useful, beautiful, lifesaving and secure knots." ("All Tied Up With Philippe Petit" is 7:30 p.m. April 19.) Lest the topic sound technical, be assured that Petit's book of knots is infused with surprises, trivia, anecdotes, challenges, magic, poetry, and the author's own drawings, and it even contains a coiled little red cord on which to practice.

Petit's expertise is derived from rigging and knotting the cable wires he has so famously walked. In 1974, after six years of nurturing a dream to high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center, the diminutive Frenchman did the seemingly impossible. Along 250 feet of one-inch braided steel cable, he walked across the 130-foot-wide canyon from the South Tower to its twin, some 1,368 feet above the sidewalks of New York City.

The feat was something Petit felt compelled to do. It was "a calling of the romantic type," he has said. Because of the bond formed with the buildings through months of scrupulous planning, and because he saw them from a perspective no one else ever did, Petit felt a palpable loss when the towers fell on 9/11.

"The intimate relationship with those towers ... they were embedded in me," he said. "So there was something extracted from me that day. But thousands of human lives were taken as well, and that cannot compare with somebody feeling that two towers are being stolen from him."

Petit writes of "le coup," as he refers to the World Trade Center walk, in his book "To Reach the Clouds," which has been renamed "Man on Wire" to conform with the movie title. Of that first step onto the wire from the flank of the South Tower, he said, "I tried to do justice to what I felt when I wrote that chapter. The terror was more around me than inside me."

"Why Knot?" was written with as much passion as any other project Petit has undertaken.

"Whenever I do something," he said, "the passion is always there. It's inside me. Even if I do something simple like washing a window, the window has to be perfectly clean. ... Passion should be the mother of every human endeavor."

Frankel will appear with Petit, at his request, at his knot-tying presentation. "Here's the funny thing," the festival organizer said, laughing. "I don't know how to tie my shoes. I wear sneakers without laces, I wear zip-up boots ... Philippe swears he's going to teach me how to be comfortable tying knots."

"We're a little festival with a very small crew," Frankel added. The events, she said, are informal with presenters accessible. Web streaming, said Frankel, "is a way for us to bring the festival to a huge audience and still have it be totally intimate."